Holes in our Heads

by Deana Chadwell9/19/17
We’ve all noticed that our leftist fellow-Americans have ceased to make sense. We’ve figured out that they’ve descended into redundant, irrational name-calling because they’ve lost the thread of their argument – if there ever was one. But, lately, due to several articles I’ve run across, I’m beginning to suspect that some actual, physical brain anomalies may be in play here. I’m not being sarcastic.

In a recent study done in Great Britain, using a half million participants, scientists discovered that people who suffer from depression show changes in the white matter of the brain – that part that is key to communication. Since depression has reached epidemic proportions, this seems important. A study done by the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance discovered that the hippocampi of the brains of depressive individuals appear to have shrunk. An article in Science Daily reported on a study of casual marijuana users that showed a noticeable difference in the shape, size, and density of the reward centers of the brain – affecting motivation – and of the amygdala – the emotional center of the brain. In fact, a study done at the University of Michigan showed that experience, psychoactive drugs, sex hormones, and dietary factors affected the shape of the brain. Not the mind, the brain.

I could go on and on. Recent technology is allowing us to see the brains of living people, to watch them work, so we can now start to ask some very important questions. The questions that come to my mind center around the leftist brain. It seems the more obvious it is that collectivist ideas are all vacant and useless – whether we’re watching the Venezuelans forced to eat rabbits, looking at the abject failure of the War on Poverty and its dissolution of the nuclear family, or at the Muslim destruction of European culture – the more adamant and angry socialists become. They seem utterly unable to walk away from demonstrably false concepts. Why is that?

We can show them the climate change data and the numerous times that data has been falsified, and what do we get? A stare as blank as a petit-mal seizure. We can whip out the statistics on the starvation factor in North Korea and the same thing happens – no contact made. I’ve been amazed listening to the protestors in St. Louis. They appear to have no ability to question the presuppositions they had before the trial, nor do they have even a glimmer of the absurdity of their preference for justice-by-mob. Here are streets filled with black people demanding the right to lynch their fellow man, yet I see no flicker of irony on any of the faces.

The same was true of the protestors in Berkeley. No grasp at all of the silliness of demanding the right to express their ideas by denying another person’s right to express his. No inkling of the contradictory nature of their stance – i.e. that committing violence is free speech, but that free speech, when it is actually speech, is not. Not free, not allowed, not appreciated. These are supposedly intelligent, expensively educated people.

How can a normal brain function like that? How did we get to the point where people, instead of arguing logically against policies and positions, prefer to promote the assassination of a sitting president, burn American flags, or think that tearing down statues will somehow fix society? That’s not just a difference of opinion; it’s medical pathology.

There was a time when most of us saw mental disease as a disability of the mind, the immaterial self, but I’m beginning to believe that it may also be physical. Can one think untruth day after day, year after year and expect it to not affect one’s brain? We recognize that daily indulging in chocolate milkshakes will affect our waistlines; is it so far-fetched then to wonder what a constant intake of anger will do to the cerebral cortex? Will a steady diet of lies eat actual holes in the grey matter? Any attempt I make to converse with leftists always leaves me scratching my head – the wiring just seems to be off.

Is it wise to assume that we can live in anger and bitterness for months and months and not have it twist our brain’s chemistry? No affect the delicate cell structures? Can we routinely ingest drugs – prescribed or purchased on a street corner – and expect the synapses to go off when they should? I mean, if I put water in the gas tank will the engine run?

And if we have actually changed our brains, can we change them back? Is the plasticity of the brain that flexible?

I think of the stanza from Frost’s The Road Not Taken –

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day,
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Can we come back? Have we “educated” the last two generations into serious, permanent, mental disabilities? Have people developed eating habits, pharmaceutical practices, thinking propensities that have distorted their brains to point where they really can’t see the logic, can’t process any factual information that doesn’t already fit the rigid shape their brains are locked into?

I believe it is possible to reshape a crooked brain. I believe that’s what the Bible means when it says that those who believe are “new creatures in Christ.” It takes time for an abused brain to recover, time and a steady, hefty diet of biblical thinking, but I’m living proof it can happen and I’ve seen it happen to many, many others. But, I’ve also seen many who keep on keeping on with those things that are ruining whatever brains they have left.

You know those scenes in old movies where the heroine has thrown herself into a hysterical hissy-fit and a more level-headed character has to slap her across the face to bring her back to sanity? That’s a good metaphor for America today. Too many American brains have gotten warped, misshapen, and hysterical for the nation to function. I suspect that these Western wildfires, the two hurricanes, and whatever disasters happen next are Providence giving us a collective slap across our arrogant faces in hopes that we’ll snap out of it long enough to start rebuilding whatever remains of our national psyche, of the American soul. There is much work to do, much healing to happen, much prayer needed. God help us.

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About Deana Chadwell

I have spent my life teaching young people how to read and write and appreciate the wonder of words. I have worked with high school students and currently teach writing at Pacific Bible College in southern Oregon. I have spent more than forty years studying the Bible, theology, and apologetics and that finds its way into my writing whether I'm blogging about my experiences or my opinions. I have two and a half moldering novels, stacks of essays, hundreds of poems, some which have won state and national prizes. All that writing -- and more keeps popping up -- needs a home with a big plate glass window; it needs air; it needs a conversation.
I am also an artist who works with cloth, yarn, beads, gourds, polymer clay, paint, and photography. And I make soap.

9 Responses to Holes in our Heads

Deana,
You have correctly diagnosed the disease, Communism/Socialism/Progressivism. Many will actually grow out of it. However, substantial numbers will buy into it for their entire lives; just as there are unrepentant Nazis there will always be unrepentant CSPs. Hold hope for those that see the error and damn those who don’t.

They are the enemy of humanity. I fought Communists in Asia, N. America, S America, Europe and the Mid East they are all the same. To paraphrase General Sheridan, the only good Communist is a dead Communist.

An interesting concept, and very plausible given known changes caused by factors such as marijuana use. But I will note that a poll reported today that college Republicans are as likely to support violence to suppress “offensive” views as college Democrats (much to my disappointment).

But I will note that a poll reported today that college Republicans are as likely to support violence to suppress “offensive” views as college Democrats (much to my disappointment).

I wonder if that is actually correct? I saw the poll in question and it simply mentioned something like 19% of “college students” supported violence to suppress offensive views. I didn’t see any breakdown as to the number of college students identifying as “Democrats or liberals” and “Republicans or conservatives.” Therefore, I was not able to determine if the same percentage of college “Republicans” were for violence as were “Dims”. Given the political mood on college campuses today, I would suspect that there are many more college “Dims” than “Republicans.” For this reason, unless a poll gives exact breakdowns as to those questioned, I would suspect more “Dims” were represented that “Republicans.” If this is the case, the 19% would be more “Dims” than “Republicans.”

The article I read on it broke it down into 20% of Democrats, 22% of Republicans, and 16% of independents. Approval of such violence was also 30% for males and 10% for females. They did note that the Republicans were a much smaller sample than the Democrats, meaning a greater margin of error. It’s possible that their response is based on the idea of payback — if the liberals are going to attack conservatives (and they are), then conservatives should have the same “right” to attack liberals. Here is the link:

I read an article this morning that said that one-in-five college students believed in violence to suppress speech they don’t like. Here’s another article on the subject.

As for the difference between Republicans and Democrats, I no longer acknowledge much of a difference. Sure, different tribes showcase different public gestures. But at the end of the day, when the government spends so much and controls so much (and people take so much), there is “conservatism” in name only, where it is more of a public or social spectacle, where grievance, not reform, is the thing, where the right and left blur into each other in expressions of dissatisfaction.

Hey, if someone were to tear out Obamacare root and branch, and fix the numerous other problems with statist health care/insurance, I’ll acknowledge that there is a significant conservative movement in this country. But there is not. Conservatism is all but dead accept as a personal set of virtues one adheres to. The rest is about dividing up the spoils or living in the mindspace of grievance.

Doing without, enduring discomfort, delaying gratification, honoring the “shalt nots,” making rational choices, and recognizing the need for limits — these are conservative things. In a land without these what is there to do but forever try to chip away at the discomforts, including hearing words and ideas that one does not like?

Can we come back? . . . I believe it is possible to reshape a crooked brain. I believe that’s what the Bible means when it says that those who believe are “new creatures in Christ.”

There are two problems:

1) There is a shortage of moral mentors
2) Few would listen if there were

Today you are on the vanguard of “morality” if you use the right one of a burgeoning set of gender-specific pronouns. God may be love. But god, first of all, is sanity. If this is not so, there can be no coherence. And when we say that “god” has been taken out of this or that, too often we think of a set of moral precepts that are being ignored. And that may be all well and good. But the root issue is coherent sanity.

Think of how useless all that blacktop would be if some drove on the left, some drove on the right, etc. It would be incoherent insanity.

A man gives a reasoned opinion at Google for why there might be fewer women in tech jobs. (Because men, by an large, prefer tech jobs and women don’t.) He was fired. This is incoherent insanity. Yes, it’s Big Brother Orwellianism. It’s fascism of the type that really matters. And it’s feminism gone insane. But most of all its an attack on just the coherence of truth, let alone the time-tested American tradition of honoring honest and free thought.

To my mind, most of the Christian church are infected with the same incoherency. Most are tracking with the culture. Few get down to brass tacks, the basic tenet that man can only truly improve by chipping away at his rough edges, embracing some “thou shalt nots,” and not making excuses for any behavior under the rubric that to “shalt not” someone is not only injurious but quite possibly racist or sexist as well.

Sting, a somewhat pompous pseudo-intellectual lyricist, did write a lyric that (however it’s intended) does seem to make sense:

Men go crazy in the congregations, they only get better one by one.

Connect to God through prayer. But beware the crazy, incoherent masses of today.

“These are supposedly intelligent, expensively educated people.” There in lies the problem Deanna, what passes for education at most universities today and for more than a decade or two now, is not education at all, it is leftist indoctrination.
My youngest left for Ohio State, about twelve or thirteen years ago, as a fairly well balanced mostly conservative kid, and came home an avowed communist, (she says socialist), atheist, hate American first leftist. She can say that all Republicans are hateful bigoted racist and when I ask her, does that include your Mom and Dad?, Well that’s different. She will not talk politics with her folks anymore, because we are too stupid and naive to understand the world as it is, (my interpretation of what she is thinking, not expressed by her).
Home schooling may be the thing that saves this nation, but the left has figured that out and they are ramping up their assault on the home schoolers to kill this monster,(in their eyes), before those kids are the ones to take over all positions of power, and the left will find itself on the outside looking in.
God help us indeed.

The moment I read this, I asked myself, “What the hell was this woman doing canoeing down the Amazon by herself?”

I have traveled in about 40 different countries, and I would never be brave enough (foolhardy might be a better word) to do what this woman did.

Since she was a British teacher, one can be fairly confident that she was a leftist who probably believed the feminist WE ARE THE WORLD propaganda about everyone being able to do exactly what they want wherever they want without consequence. You know, the idea that people everywhere are basically good. The poor woman paid a terrible price for her foolishness.

I call this attitude, “Wishing away reality.” Sometimes, reality catches up with such people.